Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Pledged delegate or Trojan Horse delegate? The campaigns want to make sure they know who their delegates are:

Barack Obama's and Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaigns are purging potential California delegates to ensure that only their loyalists vote at the national convention that will crown one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee. Locked in a race with an uncertain outcome, representatives for both camps this week directed the California Democratic Party to remove dozens of names from the lists of more than 2,000 potential delegates. Party caucuses scheduled for Sunday will elect a slate of delegates for each candidate.

Driven by fears that some prospective delegates might be concealing their true allegiances, the campaigns are searching campaign finance data, scouring the Internet and making telephone calls to weed out dubious candidates. Neither side wants to elect a delegate who might really support their rival, or other candidate....Suspicions about delegate loyalty have been heightened because the party has no rules guaranteeing they must vote at the convention for the candidate to which they are pledged during elections. - AP

Once the delegates are chosen on Sunday, they can't be replaced if they turn out not to be loyal. Now is the only chance the candidates have to check their delegates out.

Update 4/10: We should have noted above that it was the Obama campaign who did most of the purging (900, to Clinton's 50), and apparently a lot of grass-roots Obama supporters were knocked off the lists, and they weren't happy about it. So tonight the Obama campaign did an about-face:

Facing a backlash from supporters, Barack Obama's presidential campaign reversed course Thursday and reinstated hundreds of people to lists that will be used to choose California's delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Campaign manager David Plouffe said in a letter to potential delegates that all names would be restored to ballots that will be used Sunday to elect the delegates, overturning the earlier decision. The letter did not refer to the complaints. (Hat tip to gloria1129 in the comments).

"Facing a backlash from supporters, Barack Obama's presidential campaign reversed course Thursday and reinstated hundreds of people to lists that will be used to choose California's delegates to the Democratic National Convention."(AP)